Threat
by Tolakasa
Summary: AU, future. Sometimes the most obvious danger isn't the one you should be focused on. Character deaths.
1. Threat

**Threat**

The house held three bodies.

The woman—Ellen Harvelle, who was supposed to have died a year ago when her bar exploded—had landed in a broken heap at the base of one wall and was half-buried in a pile of books that had the occult experts drooling; he'd had to threaten their jobs, and promise that they could have all the books later, to get them off the crime scene. She'd hit hard, so hard the wall had buckled.

The older man—Bobby Singer, who was supposed to be smarter than to let this kind of thing into his own goddamned house—was eviscerated, his blood soaking another four stacks of books...but it was a polite, almost finicky mutilation, no evidence of wasted effort at all. Whatever it was, it had hit fast: Bobby had died still clutching his stomach, trying to hold his insides in.

There wasn't a mark on the third body. He lay on the floor without so much as a bruise, looking like he'd just laid down and gone to sleep—no pain, no horror frozen on his face, like the others; just peace, and a bit of a smile. Almost like he welcomed death.

And that was _not_ right. Dean Winchester wasn't the kind to embrace death. Throw himself in its path headlong, sure, but not _welcome_ it.

Victor had never put stock in what he'd been told about these two. He'd always been convinced that Dean was the threat. Sam was the reluctant criminal, dragged into this life by a father and brother who manipulated him for their own purposes. Every report, every shred of evidence—_real_ evidence, anyway, not the hunter-blather he'd been forced to listen to—indicated that _Dean_ was the instigator, the mastermind, and Sam was just a good kid with an overblown sense of loyalty who kept getting sucked into his brother's schemes. Sam was going to be the one who eventually saw the light and helped him put Dean on death row where he belonged.

And instead, it was _Dean_ lying dead on the floor in Bobby Singer's house, and every indication that _Sam_ was the one who had killed the others.

"Which one died first?" Victor asked, though he knew what the answer to that would be. The thin layer of dust over Dean Winchester's corpse, sifted down from the cracked plaster of ceiling and walls, answered that question.

"This one," the criminalist said, indicating Dean. "He was dead by the time they—the whatever—started tearing the house apart. Don't think it was long before the other two, though. Rigor's about the same."

No. Of course not. It wouldn't have been. Sam wouldn't have killed Dean. But as soon as Dean was dead...

"Fucking idiots," he muttered, and jerked his cell phone out of his pocket and punched in a number. Every hunter in the _world_ knew not to kill Dean Winchester and not to let him die. Beat him up, maybe. Make his life even more miserable, definitely. But never, ever, under _any_ circumstances, _kill_ him. Not unless you took care of Sam _first_. Hell, even _John_ had known that. That was why he'd done—whatever it was he'd done, to bind his son to Sam, to buy the rest of the world a quarter century to prepare.

He should have believed what Gordon Walker told him. Should have accepted more of his help, instead of just arranging for his release in exchange for information on the Winchesters.

Voice mail picked up. That was the problem with hunters; they never answered the phone. It was almost as annoying as having to deal with their superstitious blather—and having said blather turn out to be _real_—in the first place.

"Victor Henriksen. We've got a problem." He looked at the bodies again. "_The_ problem," he specified, and hung up.

**_the end_**


	2. Scourge

**Spoilers through at least 3x02**

**

* * *

**

Scourge 

Dean died, because Sam wasn't good enough to save him, and the world changed. Not in the way he expected, with grief and an aching hole in his heart, but in actual, physical changes, a lust for hot blood and raw meat that he couldn't control. Fingers twisted into talons, teeth became fangs, rage overwhelmed him, and when he got control of himself, Ellen was dead under a pile of books and Bobby—dear _God_, Bobby—

Sam fled out into the darkness, running blindly, and he ran farther and faster and longer than he ever had before. When he came back to himself, he was on the highway talking to a hitchhiker.

That moment of clarity lasted for only a heartbeat.

When Henriksen emerged from Bobby's house, looking grim, cellphone stuck to his ear, Sam was crouched on the top of a pile of crushed cars, balanced there like a cat, lazily stripping the remaining flesh from the hitchhiker's left tibia. Hatred and anger boiled up and escaped through his teeth as an inhuman snarl.

Hours. Merely hours. He still had a grasp of time, though he had to fight for it, fight as desperately as he'd ever fought for anything. Only _hours_ for the world to change. Hours for _him_ to change.

Humanity was slipping away from him. He didn't know why, only knew that at the moment of Dean's death, the desire for hot blood and raw meat had taken over and he'd watched helplessly as his body went on a rampage. It had taken all his strength to stop at _killing_ Bobby and Ellen, which left him none for saving the hitchhiker whose bones were scattered by the highway.

His jaw hurt where the molars were loosening; two had already fallen out, while the front teeth had gotten sharper and longer, like a predator's. His back ached in two long lines below the shoulder blades, and it felt like something was wriggling beneath the skin, fighting to get out. He could see colors even by moonlight, hear the whine of cars on the highway twenty miles away, smell the blood of the agents examining the house as it pulsed confined in their veins. When he thought about it, thought really hard, he could will himself into shadows and become invisible.

He didn't know why. Every hunter that had proclaimed him a danger or called him a monster, they'd never said anything a _physical_ transformation; it was all about psychic power and magic. Even the ones who called him the Antichrist had never mentioned anything like this.

Four nights after Dean died, the pain in his back sharpened and the skin split and a pair of bat-like wings emerged. Instinct drove him to the sky.

Teeth. Wings. Hunger.

What was he becoming?

_Why?_

* * *

He lost his sense of time, and then he lost his watch, somewhere in a vagrant's guts. 

After the seventh death, Sam tried to hide in the mountains, where nobody lived, hoping it would be safer that way, and discovered two things: he no longer felt the cold, despite clothes that had quickly become little more than bloody rags, and animal meat sat in his stomach like so many rocks until it finally forced its way back up his esophagus. The wendigo fared somewhat better, but was like dry bread after a feast and did nothing to sate the eternal hunger. The campers were the best; they gave him not only a meal but a laptop and an idea.

Henriksen tasted like vengeance and justice, tainted with copper. The other agents were so much meat, tasty in their own way, but he didn't know them, didn't care what their names were, didn't care for anything but the taste of their flesh between his teeth and the salt of the blood running down his throat.

"You should have let me save Dean."

Sam looked up, and growled at the sight of Ruby. "He didn't want—"

"He would have wanted to save you from this," the demon said softly, kneeling in front of him.

"Did you know—"

She shook her head. "This wasn't part of the plan. This— We knew you were special, Sam, but we thought it was a different kind of special. Nobody realized you were the—you were this."

"What am I?" he whispered.

"I can't tell you."

"_Yes you can!_" he shouted.

"No," she said, "I _can't_. Demons can't say it. You need to ask a human."

Ask a human. He couldn't go _near_ humans without wanting to kill and eat. "Did Yellow Eyes do this to me?" he asked.

"No," she said. "This is what you were born for."

He screamed—what, he never knew, since when he came to himself he was lying in a puddle of blood and meat and bone that had Ruby's blond hair.

_

* * *

Ask a human._

Easier said than done. Every human he'd seen for the last—

Every human he'd seen since Dean had died, he'd killed. Not just killed, _eaten_. Bobby, Ellen, Henriksen, even Ruby; there was nobody _left_.

_Wait._

There was one left. If he could just hold on to himself long enough to ask— If she knew, if she wasn't too scared or too intent on killing him—

_Would that be so bad?_

He lifted his head. The breeze was full of scents, scents that not so long ago he hadn't even been able to detect, and there hers was—distant, but distance was hardly anything to him anymore.

It was farther than he thought, and he was so hungry when he finally closed in on her scent that he practically fell out of the sky to land at her feet. She jumped away, raising a gun, before she got a good look at him. "_Sam?_" she blurted.

_Jo_. The scent of her blood was sweet and heavy in the air.

No. He had to focus. Had to stay human. "Kill me," he whispered.

"Oh, God, Sam..." She reached out, hesitantly, to touch his face. He flinched away with a snarl. "I'm so sorry—"

"Stop me, Jo, _please_—"

"I can't—"

"_I killed your mother!_"

"I know. But—_nothing_ can kill you. Nobody can. Not now."

He staggered away from her, away from the temptations of blood and meat. "What am I?"

She looked at him—just looked, with a compassion he hadn't seen from her since Meg-as-Sam had attacked her. "The books call it the Scourge. When the earth reaches its limits, a Scourge is born. You—its job is to cleanse the world."

"One person can't—"

"You're not a person anymore, Sam." The words were soft, gentle, completely unlike Jo, and the uncharacteristic gentleness killed any hope he had left. "The hunger will only get worse. You can't fight it forever. It'll stay with you till you've killed enough to restore the balance, or until there's nobody left, if that's what it takes." She hesitated. "Your daddy—he recognized you, somehow. You should have changed years ago. But he did something that bound you to Dean. Kept you human, long as Dean lived. Never told you. Either of you. I guess he thought it was safer that way."

Dean. By failing to save Dean, he'd condemned himself to—to this.

"Hunters have known what you are for years. Even the FBI guy knew, somebody told him back when he first started investigating John. He never believed us, not really, that's why he was so determined to catch Dean, but now—he's got no choice."

"Had."

"What?"

"I—I—" He was still human enough to cry, to mourn the lives he'd taken.

"Oh, God. I'm sorry, Sam." She touched his shoulder, lightly, undoubtedly meaning to offer what reassurance she could.

The hunger took over, and Sam lost every shred of control.

**_the end_**


End file.
